James Davis

James Davis teaches in the American Studies Program and the English Department, where he is also the deputy chair for graduate studies. He is the author of Eric Walrond: A Life in the Harlem Renaissance and the Transatlantic Caribbean (2015) and Commerce in Color: Race, Consumer Culture, and American Literature, 1893-1933 (2007). He has received the Leon Levy Center for the Study of Biography Fellowship and Brooklyn College's Claire Tow Distinguished Teacher Award and Whiting Award for Excellence in Teaching in the Humanities.

Education:

Areas of Expertise:

Davis is primarily intersted in the relationship between literature and social history in the United States. His recent research extends into questions of diasporic, or transnational, racial identity and literature.

Books and Publications

Review of Shannon King, Whose Harlem Is This, Anyway? Community Politics and Grassroots Activism During the New Negro Era (New York University Press, 2015), Journal of American History. (Books and Publications: Forthcoming Publications) 2016

Eric Walrond: A Life in the Harlem Renaissance and the Transatlantic Caribbean. New York: Columbia University Press. (Books and Publications: Book) 2015

"A Prism So Strange: The Biography of Eric Walrond." Eric Walrond: A Critical Heritage. Eds. Louis J. Parascandola and Carl A. Wade. University of the West Indies Press. (Books and Publications: Chapter) 2013

Davis, James and Louis J. Parascandola. "A West Indian Grows in Brooklyn: The Early American Experiences of Eric Walrond." Eric Walrond: A Critical Heritage. Eds. Louis J. Parascandola and Carl A. Wade. University of the West Indies Press. (Books and Publications: Chapter) 2013

"The Redrawn Map of Eric Walrond's Caribbean." Review of In Search of Asylum: the Later Writings of Eric Walrond.S/X Salon 8, February: http://smallaxe.net/wordpress3/reviews/. (Books and Publications: Book Review) 2012

"Confessions of the Flesh: The Mass Public in Epidermal Trouble in Nathanael West's Miss Lonelyhearts and George Schuyler's Black No More" (reprint). Short Story Criticism 116: 213-47. (Books and Publications: Peer Reviewed Article) 2009

"Ichiro Is a Punk, and Other Lessons from Teaching 'The Immigrant Experience.'" Radical Teacher 84, Special Issue on Immigration and Education, spring. (Books and Publications: Peer Reviewed Article) 2009

"The World's Columbian Exposition." Oxford Encyclopedia of African-American History. Oxford University Press. (Books and Publications: Other Article) 2009

Review of "Look for Me All Around You: Anglophone Caribbean Immigrants in the Harlem Renaissance," by Louis Parascandola (2005), Afro-Americans in New York Life and History 33.1, January: 141-46. (Books and Publications: Other Article) 2009

"The Art of Grieving: Colm Toibim's The Master" (book review). Death Studies 32: 181-87. (Books and Publications: Other Article) 2008

Commerce in Color: Race, Consumer Culture, and American Literature, 1893-1933. University of Michigan Press. (Books and Publications: Book) 2007